Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.
We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!
Like many people I'm here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I've been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed...
My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
So Google is now preventing people from removing location data from photos taken with Pixel phones.
Remember when Google's corporate motto was "don't be evil?"
Obviously, accurate location data on photos is more useful to a data mining operation like Google.
From Google: "Important: You can only update or remove estimated locations. If the location of a photo or video was automatically added by your camera, you can't edit or remove the location."
If you care about the planet, please make sure you sit down before you start reading this post about ExxonMobil.
So.
The CEO of ExxonMobil just said this in an interview: "We’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need, as a society, to start reducing emissions."
Who's the most influential voice on climate change? Who's to blame for inaction on climate change?
According to the CEO of ExxonMobil, it's environmental activists.
No, really:
"Frankly, society, and the activist—the dominant voice in this discussion—has tried to exclude the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies."
Oh, and the CEO of ExxonMobil also apparently thinks consumers are to blame for climate inaction:
"Today we have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that."
Gets better.
He thinks unnamed 'people who generate emissions' should pay for it. (Rather than, say, major transnational oil companies.)
"People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price. That’s ultimately how you solve the problem."
So, remind me again. Who knew about climate change before most of the public?
"Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue... This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation."
And just who, exactly, stood in the way reducing emissions all these years?
"ExxonMobil executives privately sought to undermine climate science even after the oil and gas giant publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, according to previously unreported documents...
"The new revelations are based on previously unreported documents subpoenaed by New York’s attorney general as part of an investigation into the company announced in 2015. They add to a slew of documents that record a decades-long misinformation campaign waged by Exxon, which are cited in a growing number of state and municipal lawsuits against big oil."
#Now it’s #Ivanka Trump’s turn to face questioning in the #civil#fraud#trial that is publicly probing into the family business. #Trump’s eldest daughter, who has been in his inner circle in both #business & #politics, is due on the stand Wed, after trying unsuccessfully to block her #testimony.
Elon's "extremely hardcore" toxic work culture means people are forced to take Adderall without a prescription to meet their workload. Just ask SpaceX employees.
"Some SpaceX workers resorted to taking Adderall to keep up with the pace of work at the company's launch facility, and others found themselves falling asleep in the bathroom during long workweeks, a recent Reuters investigation found.
"Travis Carson, a former SpaceX worker at the company's facility in Brownsville, Texas, told Reuters some workers took Adderall — a stimulant designed to help people with ADHD improve their focus and concentration levels — without a prescription to keep up with the pace of work."
Got down to #author stuff, now that I'm retired and can devote time to the #business of #writing#fiction. First order of business: catalog the unsold novels from after the burn out that need revision and rewrites.
Turns out that disconnecting my Mac from my work VPN messed up my folders. I had somehow mapped (don't know the Mac term) my work Windows computer folders to the Mac, and when I look in documents it tries to find it on the network and fails. If I reboot, so long as I go directly from my user's directory to documents directory, I'm good. If I click on Documents in Finder, it redirects and I'm screwed.
First thing I did was copy all my writing folders to the desktop. At least I've lost none of my old novels and short work.
I thought there were 7 completed books, and I said so online. There are actually 9, three that form a trilogy and one novel with a sequel in the mix. There are two incomplete novels.
Some works are older than others. Pages refuses to open one novel from 1996, a fun space opera that possibly has the highest chance of early sales. I haven't tried the others. Now I gotta install Word, of which I am not a fan, and investigate programs that'll open the really old files. If anyone wants to chime in with suggestions, please do! (I can always find someone with a Windows machine if need be.) Putting Google on TODO. I actually have original copies of chapters from my Apple ] days, but thankfully I updated those to the Mac and to a new millennium version of Word in what were my PowerPC days.
Incidentally, there really are three novellas in good shape.What surprises me though? There looks like about 15 short stories, many complete because I see multiple submissions in the various folders. I completely forgot about these, and was sure I never wrote short-form.
Just finished watching Samsung Unpacked.
"A new era for Mobile AI!"
Ugh.
This is going to be a minor iterative year for Galaxy Fans. The hardware is only getting small changes. The major claims about AI mostly come from Google Gemini (which Google PAINSTAKINGLY kept reiterating would be on "android" phones, not just Galaxy phones).
And we glossed over a lot of the things that might impact folks daily use, like Exynos chips vs Qualcomm chips.
When pocket computers are THIS expensive, I think we need to see more than a handful of translation features and photo editing tools.
We did get a sneak peek at this new Galaxy Donut CG render though. So that was cool.
📌 Industrial robots today are programmed to perform specific and repetitive tasks, which limits their versatility; to make them perform different actions, they need to be reprogrammed by a person.
Looks like the Boring Company's Las Vegas tunnels are going about as well as you'd expect from an Elon project...
"The muck pooling in the tunnel at the north end of the Las Vegas Strip had the consistency of a milkshake and, in some places, sat at least two feet deep. ... At first, it merely felt damp. But in addition to the water, sand and silt—the natural byproducts of any dig—the workers understood that it was full of chemicals known as accelerants.
"The accelerants cure the grout that seals the tunnel’s concrete supports, helping the grout set properly and protecting the work against cracks and other deterioration. They also seriously burn exposed human skin. At the Encore dig site, such burns became almost routine, workers there told Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration. An investigation by the state OSHA, which Bloomberg Businessweek has obtained via a freedom of information request, describes workers being scarred permanently on their arms and legs. According to the investigation, at least one employee took a direct hit to the face. In an interview with Businessweek, one of the tunnel workers recalls the feeling of exposure to the chemicals: “You’d be like, ‘Why am I on fire?’”"
Now that Twitter is rate limiting access, and more users who create Twitter's content are leaving, I wonder how this will impact all of those so-called "Threat Intel" companies? I know of at least one which was likely getting most of it's data from Twitter searches. I'm guessing most of these companies will pay for the Blue Checkmark to retain access to Twitter's now Premium API, but what's the point if the users who create the data are leaving? The second option is moving their data-mining operations over to ActivePub, except ActivePub isn't curated by fancy algorithms, it's just a raw fire hose. #infosec#twitter#business#threatintel
Hold on a sec, weren't we all told that privatisation would lead to cheaper electricity prices?
Weren't we told that repealing the carbon tax would lead to cheaper electricity prices?
Weren't we told that sticking with (more expensive) coal and gas power over (cheaper) renewables and storage would lead to cheaper electricity prices?
From the ABC:
"At the heart of the price gouging inquiry, initiated by the ACTU and led by Allan Fels, is determining in a high inflation environment what's general inflation and what else might be influencing pricing behaviour, the main offending price gouging industries, how they do it and how it impacts everyday Australians.
"Part of the problem is Australia is awash with oligopolies, which means there isn't as much price competition as there might otherwise be, which helps explain why real wage growth has been low and why the real prices of so many goods are so high.
"And while most of the media attention has been on Coles and Woolworths, the report will include other sectors accused of customer gouging and breaching trust such as energy, airlines and banks.
"Sydney University professor Lynne Chester, from the school of social and political sciences, supplied the inquiry with a detailed submission ... [which] said electricity prices have been escalating since 2005, largely due to increases in the charges paid for the generation of electricity. She said the charge for electricity makes up a significant component of the electricity price paid for by consumers.
"A key issue was that the regulation was designed for a competitive market, assuming competition would deliver lower prices, but the market was never competitive due to the presence of big powerful generator companies that have been merging with retail companies to create giants such as AGL, Origin and Energy Australia."
The video of my talk from March is out now, so if any of you are interested in seeing me talk about being a fangirl for software and how you can turn fans like me #marketing channel for your business, here you go: https://youtu.be/1YmPWhN7ebE
Or you can watch it if you want to enjoy me being extremely nervous and doing a dramatic hair flip + making constant jokes at my own expense. That’s fun too 😅
Why Boeing needs to be run by engineers and not bean counters
Really insightful video about what has gone wrong.
Among the points Casey makes is that Boeing imported Jack Welch's GE management culture.
This has included a focus on short-term profits over engineering, and practises such as stack ranking.
Boeing, as a major defence contractor and (direct and indirect) employer, is too big to fail.
And Casey argues that either the Board or, if they're unwilling, the US government, needs to clear out the senior management and introduce an engineer-led management team:
Sorry #VPN wie es momentan beworben wird war noch nie Sicher und ein klarer #MITM und nur bei den wenigsten Anbietern auch vertrauenswürdig - Da sind ganz dubiose & gruselige Firmengeflechte im Hintergrund. Dann kommen ein paar #Dumps und bestätigen deine Befürchtungen. VPN macht durch aus Sinn in einem #Business#Netzwerk aber eben nicht so.
»21 Million VPN User Records durchgesickert; VPN am Ende?«
Author clearly explains how private equity firms are destroying essential industries, how they avoid legal responsibility for the disastrous consequences, who’s empowering them and how they can be stopped.
Private equity’s #enshittification is to blame for much of the worst aspects of health care, housing crisis, the economy as well as the deepening wealth gap.
Apple was never going to "save" VR.
We've spent the last decade giving Apple an unlimited runway of speculation and hype to bring a face computer to market.
Instead of doing a better job earnestly and fairly covering the tech along the way, properly educating consumers on what these things can do, now even Vision Pro can't live up to the media's imagined narrative of Apple.
Apple did nothing to earn a DECADE of media support for XR products, but think of all the projects that were criticized for not living up to some kind of imaginary Sci-Fi standard.
"Wait for gen 2 or gen 3 instead!"
Techies expect everyone else to lift off like a helicopter, but Apple gets UNLIMITED runway...
Are lots of websites really going downhill and/or closing or does it just seem like it to me?
Like many people I'm here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I've been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed...
How To Do Business Casual Without Looking Like a Schmuck | Put This On (putthison.com)
It’s never been harder to figure out how to dress for work. A generation ago, the average office uniform was...